One of the leading cereal manufacturers in the U.S. and owner of numerous grocery brands, General Mills, soft launched a SharePoint site, which it branded “Connect” and designed to increase internal collaboration.

Coca-Cola Enterprises is a producer, distributor, and marketer of Coca-Cola products, with revenues in excess of $22 billion and over 72,000 employees around the world. To help facilitate company communication, the company sought a brand-centric, global portal to allow employees to engage with the site and share multimedia information with each other on a worldwide basis.

After serving as President of Proudfoot Consutling, Melgarejo left the firm to join The Highland Group in 2009 as Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director. Under his leadership, the strategy and operations firm has tripled in size and opened offices in Brazil, Chile and South Africa, among other.

Griffin Strategic Advisors LLC, a Chicago-based strategy and operations firm, announced earlier this month that it had been acquired by Acosta Sales & Marketing, a sales and marketing agency in the consumer packaged goods industry.

It’s never easy going into a year hardly anyone has hope for; 2009 has already seen layoffs, more projected layoffs, a seven-day string of losses on the Dow and unemployment numbers that continually rise. Consulting firms, of course, understand the pressure companies are under and have had to balance tough love in the present with a eye toward a future turnaround. Here are three consultancies’ take on how they will manage—and even master—one of the roughest projected years in memory.

Effective Jan. 1, 2009, Rick Wise will assume the role of CEO at Lippincott, a New York-headquartered brand strategy and design consultancy that falls under the umbrella of the Oliver Wyman Group. Wise, according to the firm, is a 20-year brand-consulting veteran whose tenure with Lippincott includes roles as senior partner and head of Lippincott’s brand strategy practice.

Ron Wince, CEO of Guidon Performance Solutions, is taking the lessons learned in the manufacturing world—namely the concepts of Lean and Six Sigma—and is applying them to companies in the healthcare, retail, public sector and financial services spaces, among other service-type industries.